Today, the breeze
billows from ocean to bay, building to a slow crescendo as it crosses Empire
and glides toward Tarheel Lane until it reaches our little yellow house, until
it blows into our opened windows, circles the room from right to left, so swift
you can see it in shifting towels hanging on the racks, in the wrinkling
plastic bags crinkling on the floor and counter. I can see it travel to me, to my face, carrying smells of
salt and sand, shell-fished crabs and clams; can feel it moving through me, fast
and cold, a chill from last year or the coming winter old; can feel it carry
past me, out the screened window down the gravel road back to the Bay, back to
the ocean and on to Hawaii, to Japan, across the Russian Steppes, the Mariana
Trench, to Boston, to Chicago, to the Midwestern Plains, to Nebraska hills, to
Iowa corn and soy, to South Dakota sunflowers, to Spirit Mound, to Vermillion,
to thoughts of where I last called home.

Somehow
I’m stuck between these places: between the Camp Tall Trees and Otter Creek
Park of my childhood and the Louisville, Kentucky of my birth; between a Hull,
Massachusetts fall and a Colebrook, Connecticut winter; between a Freedom, New
Hampshire friend who became a Freedom, New Hampshire lover; between the
Badlands and the Black Hills; between the Tetons and Jackson Hole, between
mountain passes, between trout in the Wind River and trout in the Salmon River,
between a rainbow in Lake Ethel and a cutthroat in Grizzly Bear, between Victor
and Ketchum, between an Ernest Hemingway alive and an Ernest Hemingway shot
dead and the grave marking the spot; between blades of granny smith green grass
and morning dew and Idaho’s Mountains of the Moon, and the eye of a Sunkist
yellow-orange sunset light sagging on the horizon, slowly blinking, slowly,
navel orange, quietly, a pink lady, delicately, a red delicious, erasing the
day.

Standing now in a
different place, in an altogether different landscape, where the colors of
ocean and sky fix my view, where the smell of salt has supplanted the cattle
farm on the I-29S Vermillion, South Dakota-Sioux City, Iowa corridor, where the
specter of corn and soybean as far as the eye can see transfix my imagination,
I know now what is lost—that which was once a home isn’t a home any
longer; so that when I next return I will be just a guest, a stranger passing
through, a traveler in transit, on a layover, there just for a sleepover,
trying to work off a hangover, a brief sojourn, stopping over to say goodbye
before I can remember to say hello.

Like when I try to
return to Louisville, to Otter Creek Park, to Camp—only the branches
remain. The roots, the rest, are
scattered across the fifty states, from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean, from the
Chesapeake Bay to the Puget Sound, from the Florida panhandle to the Florida
Keys, from the Gulf of Mexico to Redondo Beach in LA, from Harney Peak and
Mount Washington to the Grand Canyon to Sun Valley, spread, like peanut butter
on bread, not even, but still spread across this great expanse of mountains,
plains, roads lined with automobiles, planes filled with people wishing they’d
taken trains, four-wheelers dreaming of two-wheelers fearing eighteen wheelers
barely able see me, my branches, spread across the center striped-white lines,
vast, but lacking a center.

In our silver-gold
2001 4-Wheel Drive Toyota Highlander Limited Edition, I carry them all, all my
branches, at least the ones that’ll fit, tucked away in suitcases, bundled up
in plastic grocery bags, stuffed into coolers with wheels, hiding underneath
seats. I carry my first Louisville
Slugger wooden baseball bat, my leather Rawlings baseball glove and ball. I carry Siddhartha, Petersen’s Guide
to Western Birds, and a subscription to Playboy. I carry burnt cd’s,
mix cd’s, and a Bill Monroe Bean Blossom cassette. I carry bills, an ever-increasing
student loan debt, a sense of entitlement, snow-pants, a sweater, and camping
gear. I carry two pictures: one of
my wife on our wedding day and the other a group shot from a backpacking trip
with my friends. The digital
camera carries others: a Greg Brown and Boondocks show in Jackson Hole, Wyoming;
a three-toed woodpecker in the palm of my hand in the Black Hills; the shadow
of my back-cast fly-fishing on the Gravant; it carries too a shot of
Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, the bottles of scotch scattered across it, strewn
amongst the nickels and dimes and quarters and pennies and the two things I
placed there: a batting cage token and a brown caddis fly.

What is left of
Ernest Hemingway I remember thinking, whatever it is,
some of it is beneath me.
Standing first, then sitting at his feet, staring beneath three
evergreen trees at his name, “Ernest Hemingway,” his years alive on this earth,
July 21, 1899 to July 2, 1961, underneath this ground, how long do
you have to be dead, I wondered, before rebirth.

Maybe I was just
being optimistic.

Sitting there,
though, drinking bourbon at the foot of Hemingway’s grave, beneath the
triangle-three evergreen trees, staring at this name, those years, the
stripped-down bareness of prose on that stone, I allowed myself to imagine that
it was my name,
my years, my stone, my body immortalized with golden baseball
tokens for free batting practice in heaven, for safe passage from Charon across
the Styx, for Mark Twain down the Mississippi, for the Palace Brothers across
the muddy Ohio; my grave the wishing well for lost souls yearning, searching,
hoping to have my help, what happened to all those wishes, I thought;
with bottles of Jim Beam so I’m never thirsty, with my loved ones buried close
by, my friends and my family, like Papa’s Mary, his Jack, his Dr. Gregory: all
the things I’ll need in the afterlife.

I try to find his
eyes but nearly fifty years and a six foot piece of granite sits between
us—I see only the shadows reflected from the three evergreens. Can a wish here to Papa make all
your dreams come true? I think I remember thinking this: that it could be
the fountain of youth, or a kind of Faust with a Mephistopheles, or a
blues-player at the crossroads, or a questing knight holding the chalice of
Christ.I think I wondered
why his flat gravestone didn’t read, “Survived but was Killed
by Multiple Wars, Multiple Marriages, Multiple Stories and Novels, the War
Within.” It doesn’t really
matter. It is what it is. It says what it says. There’s no slow motion. No instant replay. No rewind button. Perhaps it’s unfair to try to redo
history, to remake movies, to rewrite books.

Or maybe I just don’t
have the talent to make headlines.

Standing
there, in the shadow of the three evergreens, I would’ve thought I’d have asked
for some of his powers: in fishing first, in writing second. Standing there, though, I couldn’t do
it. It all seemed so hokey, so
phony, so fake.
Like I was doing just what every other poor bastard wannabe writer was
doing who came to this site. Like
it could rub off or something.
Like there was smoke from his cigarette seeping through soil, sifting
through wood or metal and dirt and rock, filtering up through that concrete
slab up into my nose into my brain and by some miracle of divine inspiration
back down to my fingers, down do the computer keys, so that I can somehow
understand that war is hell, love’s a bitch, fishing’s fun, and good friends
are hard to come by.

I don’t need Ernest
Hemingway for that.

It’s hard to
know. Hard to say what I
need. To understand where I
am. At the Ketchum cemetery, looking
out from this vantage point I can see that Highway 75 is rolling by with
streaming SUV’s whizzing by the multitude of graves; I can recognize that
there’s a golf course and huge multi-million dollar vacation homes fitty
yards from the Hemingway Memorial, but he is gone. His books remain but they are not him. Ink and paper and plastic last longer
than we do. We have the power to
build machines to outlive us. Why
then, can’t I fix myself? Why
can’t I regain the inertia that keeps me grounded in this place? Why can’t I recapture the energy that
compelled me here?

Looking about, I see
that mountains remain. Streams and rivers too. Books, in time, will lose their ink. Pictures turn brown and yellow with
time. Memories, once crystalline,
once clear, blur and congeal until they disperse and spread like pollen in wind
across the grass. Pictures:
motions in still-life—how long will the images
last—the memory of images?
How long before only the memory of those memories are gone? Are all those who travel lost?

So
much, I know, is gone forever from my mind: scenes from my childhood, only glimpses
remain—my dad rescuing me from drowning in the Eastern Kentucky
University swimming pool; escaping a kidnapper when I was five and ran away
from home; my mom holding onto me when I almost flew out of The Racer rollercoaster at Kings Island in Cincinnati; my oldest brother throwing me
inside the house to avoid getting stung by a giant bumblebee that then nailed
him between the eyes; my friends and I tipping our canoe in the middle of the
Ohio River when we were in the fifth grade. So much of the rest, though, is lost. For some moments no picture remains, no
picture can tell, which helps to explain my internal drive to capture as much
of Vermillion, of South Dakota, of Sioux City as possible before I left. To somehow hold onto the Plains,
knowing, all good and too well, I was about to lose them—about to watch
foreground transform into background, from close-up to wide-angle view to out
of view altogether. Somehow knew
that the statuary off the Burbank/Elk Point exit, the concrete gorillas, the
turquoise Statue of Liberty, the old 1950s beater for sale in the middle of a
cornfield, would escape my mind.
That that subtle mixture of greens and golds and yellows coalescing
around Exit 15 on I29, that the redwing blackbird always waiting, perched only
for me on the Burbank Road/319 intersection in between Vermillion and Sioux
City would be gone or that he would now be waiting there for someone else. Somehow knew that when we emptied our
house on Elm Street it would be the end of something. That when the last box left, when the bathtub and sink and
toilet were scrubbed it would be over.
That four years spent making friends, establishing relationships, personal
and professional, could be washed away with water, scoured with bristles,
scrubbed away with old rags, sanitized with bleach.

The
thought humbles me.

So
much of me, I know, did not want to go.
Didn’t want to leave all the colors you can see on the Plains—the
way the sun reflects at different times of the day. Didn’t want to leave a boundless horizon—a place where
you can watch a thunderstorm unravel and travel to you from an hour away. Didn’t want to leave Jazz Nights
on Tuesday’s at Open Mike’s.
Didn’t want to leave hikes and tobacco offerings to Spirit Mound. Didn’t want to leave spinner fishing in
the Vermillion River or carp hunting on the Burbank. Didn’t want to stop dancing at the Poison Stream shows at
the Eagles club. Didn’t want to
walk away from the band.

So I memorized every
sign, the distance between towns, between Elk Point/Burbank and Vermillion,
between Dakota Dunes and Sgt. Floyd, between the cattle farm stench to the KMEG
television station, between the Tyson Events Center in Sioux City to Famous
Dave’s and the Ronald McDonald House by my mother-in-law’s. The racecar track, the farmhouses, the
barns, the sheds, Hamilton Boulevard, Wesley Parkway, Bomgaars, Whimps, Burbank
Feeders, cylinders, towers, curves in the road, carp fishing, the path of the
Vermillion River—it’s all too much for me to handle, too much to consider
what is lost. It overwhelms my
senses, my sense of direction, my sense of time, my place in the universe, my
role in the game, my plot in the story, my place on the map.

Even now, I’m stuck
in between worlds, somewhere in a triangle with four points, between Coos Bay
and North Bend and Empire and Charleston.
I know I’m in Oregon.
Between Bonk & Bonk Private Investigators and the Kilkich
Reservation. Off my deck, through
some evergreens, some shrubs and some bushes, a river, maybe a slough or a
reservoir I have not yet explored.
I know the ocean is near because I smell it at all times.

This world, so far
removed from the other. So far, it
seems, it’s difficult to move with it.

Here, on the coast,
the world is governed by tides.
Time now is measured by how long it takes to catch my legal limit of
clams. To get at the big ones, the
Gapers and Empires, you’ve got to be willing to get wet. You have to be willing to dig, to stick
your entire arm down a hole in the sand underneath the water to feel for and
grab at an outstretched slimy neck.
It’s possible, though, that when you find one here, you will find many,
sometimes dozens, as wide as small dish plates, some as big as Frisbees, wider
than dinner plates, bunched beside each other in beds.

On a low tide, you
can walk out barefoot on the sand left exposed by the retreated water, and with
the soles of your feet feel for Cochyl clams hunkered-in a couple of inches
deep in the sand. Granted, these
aren’t as big as the others, but the joy is in the process, in the means that
make the end. It’s when you take
your rubber boots off, when you put your shovel down, when you leave your keys
and your cell phone and your wallet in the glove compartment of your car parked
down the road that you are ready—ready to feel the subtle curves and
sharp edges with your heel, ready to dodge broken shells, to grip sand, to slip
stone with your toes, ready to stand beneath the shadow of a drawbridge, next
to gigantic discarded oyster shells, across from the grove of trees where
homeless people sleep, ready to feel your feet sink with each step, like in
quicksand minus the quick—each step, the sound of a suction cup, a vacuum
sucking up debris, each step, the sensory search for something round, something
whole, something firm, something that feels like the top of a ribbed
racquetball. What you find with
the feel of your feet you reach in the foot or two of water and dig out with
your hand. Some Cochyls are whiter,
some more brown, some more black, others more red, most often some measured
mixture of the four.

The meat you hunt
with your hands and feet—the sweetest meat of all.

And
what the ocean exposes at low tide, it hides at high. And underneath this water, I’m growing convinced, is a
crazier and far stranger world than we ever could conceive up here. What goes on inside the ocean, I
wonder, when it rains up here?
Can fish feel the thunder, can they sense the lightning? Do the pressures of life above
translate to barometric pressure below? Rumi once said, “Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in
cups. They swim the huge fluid
freedom.” What do we have up here
to compare with that? What purpose
is an individual in a school of yellow-fin? What kinds of currents are there for us to ride in on? Where are the waves to bring us to shore?

Certainly one thing
comes to shore with the tide: the crabs.
At least it brings them closer to the docks you can stand on; closer to
the spot where you can launch circular rings into the water, two of them, bound
together in mesh with rubber bait bags filled with clams or mussels or fresh
tuna heads and bodies otherwise discarded by fish cutters at the end of the
docks on the piers who love to talk about their disdain for sea lions, fishing
commercial, fishing private, boats, tourism, places to eat, places to fish, and
where to get the best mussels to use as bait for crabs.

The crabs, mostly
Dungeness in this area, it seems, are in limitless supply. They said the same thing though about
sardines in Monterey in Steinbeck’s time.
At least enough to feed my family—my family of two perpetually
growing—growing every time we go somewhere else. Family growing to mean so much more
than mere blood—expanding to mean the people we meet along the way, the
landscapes we encounter on the road, off the road, down the dirt road, up
ahead, around the bend, just over the hill, coming off, down the mountain. The fish are here, for sure. But they are in the Atlantic. They are in the Pacific, in the
Columbia, the Snake, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Ohio River of my
youth.

What’s happening
outside, I’m growing to see, is what’s happening within. The circle turns, the wheel spins,
moons wane and wax, tides rise and fall, and fish and people and mosquitoes and
bacteria and viruses and strings and quarks and neutrons and grape soda and the
Dixie Chicks all exist simultaneously on only this planet. Who can tell what is going on
everywhere else—all those places we can’t see, the visions we haven’t yet
had, the dreams not yet dreamed?

I
can’t tell, but I’m looking. What
else do we have to fall back on?
There’s a line in a Ryan Adams song which says,
“You can’t see tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes.” We can’t change the past even if that’s where we’re always
looking. The good ole days are
over. They can’t be returned. The receipt’s been lost, the expiration
date has expired, the warranty’s run out, the milk has spoiled, there’s mold on
the strawberries, the old medicine doesn’t work anymore. Not now, at least. Not here.

Mere
miles away, though, despite a long history of logging, there are a sea of
evergreens, in sharp-fine contrast, as many colors of green as there are blues
in the ocean. The trees are still
here. A lima bean, a recently
plucked green string bean, a granny smith apple, a sour apple BlowPop, an old
dirty dollar bill, an army fatigue, an olive green, a drab, an unripe yellow
squash green, a zucchini green, a black-eye green, a gangrene—they are
all here, in patterned concert, in some vast design, growing straight, lining
narrow, growing on sides of hills, kitchen tables for dining birds, chirping
sparrows, crows, and turkey vultures and bald eagles flying overhead—all
one could need to survive in the world is around me: colors, smells, visions, a
Wal-Mart, 7 Eleven’s with old-school slushy machines. We’ll make it here.
We’ll survive. In time, I’m realistic enough to know, we might
even thrive.

But there’s something
to be said about the places we’ve been, the places we’ve lived, the place we
just left. Vermtown. Vermillion: the sound is soothing when
it rolls off my tongue. Friends, family, teachers, wind, and Plains. It’s like the Mastercard
commercial—Priceless.
Everything else can be bought and sold with an extended line of credit
0% down 25% prime after six months.
In a swipe and go world I’ve come find there’s very little hard currency
left.

It’s
been said that home is the place you are welcome when no one else in the world
will take you. In an inhospitable
world, in an uncultivated civilization, where greed and the thirst for
advantage rule the day, it is comforting to know it is what it is; it is
hopeful to recognize that what will be will be, and that in the middle we can
make some choices; we can find some balance. We can know and be confident that Face Rock on Bandon Beach
is older than us. We can be sure
that there is more to the tides and the moon than we ever before
conceived. We can say for certain
that those are blackberry bushes growing wild on the side of your house, that this river does flow just beyond the green of
your backyard.

I
felt these things. Parts of me, still. The other parts are moving, though;
shifting gears on hills; changing clothes with seasons, traveling with weather,
swimming with tides. For now, I’ll
put a light jacket on. Outside, I
can hear the wind blowing.